Quote:
Originally Posted by GregAndrew
I said essentially the same thing as a comment on the page the article appears on. It is the total number of hours spent in the "Zone" by the different types of kayaks divided by the number of attacks on each. That will give you the attacks per, probably, hundreds of thousands of hours in the "Zone".
Sample size is not a term that applies here. What you have is a small number of occurrences. Sample size is the number of data points that you survey in order to make a prediction about a population. Like the number of Hobie owners you question in order to find out if they have been attacked by a shark.
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I hear you, but who has the time (or the data) for that?
That is likely why the risk of suffering a shark attack is typically expressed in terms of the overall population. For instance, you have a better chance of getting killed by a falling coconut than you do a shark... blah, blah, blah. That's no help other than in simplistically illustrating the low overall occurrence of death by shark.
Someone who never dips a toe in the ocean has no chance of succumbing, not even if they are Austin Powers (just maybe if the sharks have fricken laser beams).
Life is one big judgement call.